Conductive Ventures launches $100 million enterprise fund

There’s a new venture fund in town from some familiar faces. Carey Lai, who previously worked at Intel Capital and IVP, is joining forces with Paul Yeh, formerly of Kleiner Perkins.

They’re calling it Conductive Ventures and it’s launching with $100 million under management. They’ll be investing in “expansion stage” companies across enterprise software and hardware categories, meaning Series A, Series B and beyond. [ tech Crunch ]

Women Harassed at Uber May Finally Get a Payday. But How Much?

Uber Technologies Inc.’s $10 million settlement with women engineers who complained they were underpaid compared with men would also rid the ride-hailing giant of liability for potentially hundreds of sexual harassment incidents over the past five years. [ Bloomberg ]

Silicon Valley’s Most and Least Diverse Investors

The proportion of women in decision-making positions at the most prominent venture capital firms inched up to just over 14% last year from roughly 11% in 2016. Black representation, on the other hand, dropped marginally. That’s according to the results of a survey conducted by The Information and VC firm Social Capital, our third since 2015. [ The Information ]

Conventional thinking in venture capital is that success requires aiming for the fences. Home runs (or even grand slams) are necessary to generate a reasonable rate of return in light of the large majority of portfolio companies that go out of business. But is this the most sensible approach?

34 Top Women Investors Just Wrote a Multi-Billion-Dollar Love Letter to Founders

Imagine the next time you got a great business idea launched, you felt confident you could raise money to scale it. That's the world that 34 women investors, who represent several billion in investable capital, are calling into reality. Together, they just launched an organization called AllRaise. It's a nonprofit dedicated to normalizing what it looks like to raise money, especially for women. [ Inc. ]

Interiors marketplace eporta raises $8M, led by Canvas Ventures

In this day and age of higher expectation in offices, sourcing your furniture from Ikea no longer cuts the proverbial mustard. But the furniture industry is notoriously old fashioned, forcing buyers to leaf through hundreds of paper catalogues, most of which are outdated by the time you get around to ordering. The global design and furniture industry is worth $700 billion, and yet most of its processes for customers are stuck
in a previous age. Wouldn’t it be better if someone digitised those manufacturer catalogues, and allowed you to order direct, cutting out the middle-men?​ [ Tech Crunch ]

Patrick Pichette kick-started a conversation about work-life balance in Silicon Valley when he resigned as Google’s powerful chief financial officer at age 53 to travel the world with his wife. Vacation’s over. Now, three years later, Pichette once again has a full-time job.

Pichette is becoming a venture capitalist, joining a Canadian firm that has not made many waves in Silicon Valley: iNovia Capital. It’s a somewhat curious move, given that
Pichette likely could have had his pick of the litter among prominent Sand Hill Road firms — and Pichette said he spoke with many of the usual suspects. [ Re/Code ]

Alibaba’s Ant Financial is reportedly raising billions more at a valuation of at least $100B

Ant Financial, the Alibaba affiliate that looks after the firm’s hugely popular Alipay service, is reportedly gearing up for an enormous funding round that could take its valuation to $100-$150 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Ant is in talks to raise upwards of $9 billion at the $100 billion mark, while Bloomberg suggested that Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek is vying to lead a round of $10 billion at a valuation of $150
billion. Either round would make Ant the highest valued unicorn on the planet although it is hard to call the firm a startup considering its reliance and history with Alibaba, which it spun out of seven years ago. [ TechCrunch ]